{"id":102,"date":"2004-01-06T10:41:49","date_gmt":"2004-01-06T14:41:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=102"},"modified":"2004-01-06T10:41:49","modified_gmt":"2004-01-06T14:41:49","slug":"linux-partition-labels-considered-harmful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2004\/01\/06\/linux-partition-labels-considered-harmful\/","title":{"rendered":"Linux partition labels considered harmful"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most Unix systems, and Linux being one of them, use a configuration file called fstab to specify where the various disk drives are to appear on the system. Here&#8217;s an excerpt from one of mine:<\/p>\n<pre>\n \/dev\/hda7     \/             ext3    defaults        1 1\n \/dev\/hda1     \/boot         ext3    defaults        1 2\n<\/pre>\n<p>The first column specifies the device name. In this case, \/dev\/hda is the first hard disk, and it has (amongst others) partitions 1 and 7.<\/p>\n<p>More recently, however, it has been possible to label partitions. So instead<br \/>\nof the above, you might have:<\/p>\n<pre>\n LABEL=\/       \/             ext3    defaults        1 1\n LABEL=BOOT    \/boot         ext3    defaults        1 2\n<\/pre>\n<p>This seems like a good idea until you have to add in a hard drive, as I did recently. If both drives use the &#8216;LABEL=BOOT&#8217; syntax, the system gets confused as to which drive to boot from, and hangs.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve changed all my systems back to use the older, more cryptic &#8216;\/dev\/hd??&#8217; method. I don&#8217;t intend to swap drives in and out, but at least this way, I&#8217;m ready if I have to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most Unix systems, and Linux being one of them, use a configuration file called fstab to specify where the various disk drives are to appear on the system. Here&#8217;s an excerpt from one of mine: \/dev\/hda7 \/ ext3 defaults 1 1 \/dev\/hda1 \/boot ext3 defaults 1 2 The first column specifies the device name. In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[1675,270,1676],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-fstab","tag-linux","tag-partition"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-1E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}